Lead the way
by planet p
Summary: AU; she's going to change, for her daughter.


**Lead the way **by planet p

**Disclaimer **I don't own _the Pretender_ or any of its characters.

**Author's Notes** AU. Really odd. About Debbie's mother.

* * *

When the angel comes, I do not know. For a long time, I am not aware. Who would think him to be an angel, after all?

This angel is not like the angels they tell you about. He keeps a job with the government. He introduces my daughter to the world, and takes her to school. We have some a-taming to do!

She was born at eight years old. She burst into this world as bright as flame. Her hair is like embers and her eyes like the ocean.

She is new to this world, yet she is a world unto the world; a world of her own. Spinning, revolving; moving faster, faster, until she is dancing flame, the endless sun above.

When will it end? When will she end? When will her flame grow cold, her glow go out. Late, I pray. Late be that hour in which my heart's true love sleeps an endless sleep, the sleep of gods and demons, angels and mortals. Late be the hour of immortals and ants, I pray. I pray.

The angel is not as I expect. He has trouble seeing, trouble grasping the threads of reality which intertwine this world.

He has no wings a-feathered, no shining halo, nor pearly skin glowing softly. One day, he is sick with the flu; another day, it is something new.

Where have your wings gone? Was it someone who took them from you: a stranger, a lover, a friend, an enemy? Or was it you yourself?

Are you so broken that you may not be mended by the light? Do you give your light only that you cannot hold it in your hands? Only that it slips through the cracks in your heart, in your soul?

Are you cold, or are you warm?

Has the glow all gone out? Or did it die with your heart that day you were left alone?

I do not know why the angel has come to us, though I suppose it is just the work, just the job.

My daughter has made friends with the angel, and here I see someone that she trusts, that she loves, and I can be envious, at times.

Before he will leave again, the angel will lead us into, and away from, so many mistakes. He takes time to help my daughter with her schoolwork, with reading and writing, arithmetic and mathematics, he buys her pencils and pastels and paint to complete her artwork which she has brought home from school to complete.

For the young, there is never enough time in a day. For me, there is too much.

I think that he has nothing better to do than to make me look bad, and to make himself look good. Beside him, my daughter must think I am a bad mother.

He is often strange, I realise. He tells people their fortune over the telephone, and my daughter sits and colours the posters they will later tack up in the windows of fish and chip shops and corner stores and in bus stop shelters. Love songs make him sad, yet he insists on listening to them.

Later, I will learn that he has rang my ex and told him of our daughter. My daughter is nine now, and I do not know how much she knows, but I am angry that he would do this, as though this is no more than one more attempt to impugn my mothering abilities. Bad mother!

Once, I was an angel! Once, I shone! Once, the world was mine, and I was fantastic!

But that was once, and this is now. I am no longer fantastic. I wish that the angel should leave us, and I am angry enough to, by my own hands, send him away.

I am sure he is trying to steal my daughter away from me, though I do not think that this is because he is my mortal enemy, that he is an agent of evil, but I think that it is because he is selfish, and self-impressed and self-assured, and so sure of his own goodness and righteousness.

My daughter is ten when the angel leaves. He does not say goodbye. Perhaps he cannot, or is unwilling. Perhaps it is just a job, all along, it was just a job. Perhaps he doesn't care. I don't suppose I will ever know.

Yet, by the grace of angels, I am here today, I breathe another day. A year after the angel has left, it is my daughter who leaves me next, and I realise that I am alone, but alone with myself and the sparkling, shining, spinning world.

It is much later that I realise that I never stopped being an angel, and that the angel looked right into my soul and saw that it was also the soul of an angel, of a shining being, and that we are all angels, deep down inside, we will all shine.

And I will shine. For my daughter, I will shine. For the love of my heart's echo, my heart's refrain, my siren in the dark, a song of two hearts, two hearts beating as one.

She is a new song, a new heart, a song of love gone awry and love put back together again. In her heart, we both shine. We burn like the sun, like the world. For, once, we were her world, her sun, her guiding light – and we still can be, because that light never really goes out, and you never really stop needing that light, another heart beating close to your own, another pair of understanding eyes, and a pair of wings, invisible to those eyes, but understood and embodied within our belief. Belief in love and life and endings and happy endings and sad endings and bad things and good things and things in between.

And I shall lend my light unto an angel, to hold that angel, my own angel, once more, within my arms, safe within this world, for just a moment – and I will show her that I can shine.

See me standing here. See me here now, world. See me shining.

* * *

_The angel is Debbie's social/caseworker, if that helps. I don't know if Debbie really had a caseworker in the show, though I don't suppose she would have had, and I guess that Broots knew that he had a daughter before she was nine years old, but I thought it was appropriate for the background I've made up for her mother, which is why this is AU._

_If anyone knows Debbie's mother's name on the television show, it'd be a great help, though I am not sure that she was ever given a name?_

_I know it was odd and confusing, but any reviews would make me very happy – and, please, if you have time, vote in the poll on my profile page. =)_


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